The Indian government is stepping up its cyber security capabilities with plans to protect critical national infrastructure from a Stuxnet-like attack and to authorise two agencies to carry out state-sponsored attacks if necessary.
Sources told the Times of India that the government’s National Security Council, headed by prime …

If the Indian government are going to be employing hackers / numpties etc to do this does it mean that my customers will finally stop getting cold calls from "Windows" telling them that their computers are sending out viruses and offering to install MSE and then defrag their hard drive in exchange for hundreds of £'s?

Fair enough.

Re: Fair enough.

You best deny access to every country with an intelligence service. I would imagine every state/nation with a comms infrastructure has been developing offensive as well as defensive infosec capabilities since wires have been carrying bits. Capabilities that not only target foreign nations but any entity within their own jurisdiction that raises any kind of suspicion of opposing the status quo.

Is there any evidence anywhere that any power, foreign or domestic, abide by the laws that they create to keep the populace in their place? One is more likely to find a Routemaster bus on Mars than a truly honest, fair and just government body, regardless of nation.

Re: Fair enough.

well we Indians need not over react to stuxnet or any other planned cyber attacks on India, bcoz we dont have any secrets left to spy on, our nation is run by terrorists and rapists, we have outsourced our Governments' high level work to Italy, and guess what you could buy all our historical artifacts in the streets of Italy. So yeah all the countries who have outsourced your work with us in India, Sleep tight :)

(However I would like to add that avg Indian youth is exceptionally smart and intelligent, though due to these idiotic fools who manage the country they are not well utilized and most of them settle for jobs they are not interested or where they cant give their best.)

I'd rather have this

I'd rather cyber warfare than bullet warfare any day. You can always get better shields in cyber warfare, and some point you won't need to get better shields because everything will be as fortified as it gets and everyone will just have to play nice (it's asymptotic: it will never be this way, but we'll get closer and closer). Not the case with bullet warfare.

Re: I'd rather have this

But isn't it the case that this cyber warfare is a precursor to real warfare?

If your aim is to cause industrial damage and steal state secrets then eventually you are going to annoy someone enough they are going to just send in the troops (or a nuke).

The same can be said for gaining a technological or intelligence based advantage over another nation through hacking, That advantage is only an advantage as long as your information is relevent. A strategic decision to go to war in the first place could be obtained via hacking and therefore it is a definite trigger for real action.

Even seemingly trivial data about a certain event could be the precursor to a terrorist attack.